Saturday, March 16, 2013

Oh, I suppose I'll say that it mattered that Rob Portman flipped on marriage. It's one of those where it sort of depends on what you mean by "mattered" I suppose...but it certainly marks where we are in the process.

14 comments:

On Portman, it seems that every now and then you get a conservative who turns liberal on one isolated issue that touches him (ususally a "him") personally. All of a sudden, he'll get all "Hey, this stuff really affects people. Who could have imagined?" but it remains limited to that issue. I'm skeptical that this represents a new trend for the near or medium term, either for Portman on other issues or for the party as a whole on this issue (except in cases where more sons come out of the closet).

JB, this week a fellow named Paul M. Barrett wrote an article in Businessweek, “Why Gun Makers Fear the NRA.” He posits that the NRA doesn’t follow the orders of the arms industry; rather, it’s the other way around. He says the industry is pressed by NRA intimidation but also that it puts up with it because the NRA’s scaremongering is so good for sales. He notes that the industry and industry-tied associations, such as the National Shooting Sports Foundation, tend to make milder statements than the NRA on various issues. They turn to the NRA for guidance after incidents like Newtown. In particular, he highlights an incident in 2000 when Smith & Wesson tried to end shooting-related liability claims by negotiating a deal with the Clinton administration. The NRA (1) organized a devastating boycott of Smith & Wesson, (2) got Smith & Wesson to withdraw from the deal, (3) got Congress to extinguish all the lawsuits against all the gun makers, and (4) together with the gun makers, shut down the American Shooting Sports Council, the trade group that had promoted the negotiation approach. A chastened Smith & Wesson was then welcomed back into the fold.

It struck me that Barrett is not looking at this the right way. True, the NRA is different from other lobbies. Its membership base should make it more independent of the companies, much as the large party membership of a fascist movement makes the fascist dictator more independent than ordinary dictators from the traditional conservative social bases of dictatorship. (My apologies to Couves for the analogy.) Still, it’s not a case of the NRA, acting as a single entity, issuing orders to the arms industry.

I got to thinking of your model of political parties not as distinct organizations but as loose networks of synergistically interacting, more or less independent, more or less like-minded players, some of them operating inside formal organizations and some of them not, working toward related goals. This may be a better way to view the NRA as well, as part of a sort of informal arms-lobby/arms-industry complex. Within this network, each entity has its role to play. The gun manufacturers make the guns and are the raison d’être for the whole complex. They also supply the funds for lobbying (but not all the funds, since the membership also contributes). The NRA stirs up the membership, increases demand for guns, and acts to prevent Congress from restricting arms sales. (It has also succeeding in getting Congress to put active restraints on the ATF and to prevent gun regulation from being transferred to any agency other than the ATF; the NRA then complains that the ATF isn’t doing its job whenever some scandal occurs.) The NRA, by the public positions that it takes, also makes the arms manufacturers and the National Shooting Sports Foundation look reasonable by comparison. (The Gun Owners of America, which denounces the NRA as collaborationist, performs a similar service for it.) These roles are not necessarily consciously assigned to the different elements, but they may have nonetheless evolved to perform useful functions for the overall system. In this reading, an independent NRA didn’t put Smith & Wesson in its place; rather, a complex system disciplined an errant member, which appears clearer when you look at steps 3 and 4 in the process described above, and not just at 1 and 2.

Jobs numbers and consumer confidence matters, increasing GOP fear of sequester ramifications matters, and I'm gonna jump out on a limb and say the stupid "charm offensive" will matter if only for one thing, it amplifies the noise surrounding the GOP. Portman matters, if Facebook is any indication female conservatives are very pissed off at the GOP about this. BHO and JRB Jr. both out of the country at the same time, when the cat's away... congress could shut down a few weeks early.

CPAC surely didn't matter. Filibuster frustration doesn't matter. Pope doesn't matter at all anymore, except to true Catholics, which I am shocked still exist after the widespread pedophilia scandals around the world. US not getting to the final of the WBC again doesn't matter, but it sure is frustrating.

Have to say the North Korea warmongering matters some, even if it only increases at the margins the possibility of an accidental nuclear war.

On the Portman thing, I think it only matters in that it might accelerate the inevitable GOP acceptance/surrender on SSM. I envision it happening similar to the way GOP pols embraced Romney as the nominee. They maybe privately supported him, but waited as long as possible to publicly endorse him, because why support something that will animate parts of the base until you can do so when it is safely part of the party consensus.

New pope. ACA moving towards implementation. That NY soda tax thing is interesting even if it doesn't matter. Got me thinking: if research shows that people need "nanny state" regulations to not hurt or kill themselves, but traditional views of government hold that such regulation is unconstitutional/immoral, how long until research wins?

A new Pope obviously. It's interesting to see how many "thought leaders" seem to already formulated an opinion about the guy. Andrew Sullivan in particular. It looks like Maryland is going to end the death penalty, and as Governor Martin O'Malley is running for president it matters in that sense. Also because Maryland has a tendency to sentence innocent people to death it matters in that sense too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirk_Bloodsworth I'd say the new health care data showing the entitlements problem could have been already solved because of Obamacare matters a lot too. Ooo, ooo ooo, go read JB's posts on this at WaPo.

Obama's proposals on clean energy financing on the same day as the EPA is postponing implementation of greenhouse gas regulations of power plants. The energy plan requires congressional action so it won't happen, while the EPA is strictly administrative. If this delay results in a weakening rather than a strengthening of these regulations, it matters as one more big nail in the planetary coffin.

The new pope might matter, depending on what he does. CPAC doesn't matter. I don't think Sen. Portman's change of heart matters. While the budgets don't matter, the fact that they are all acknowledged to exist does matter.

Something else that might matter that almost nobody is paying any attention to: the state takeover of Detroit under the emergency management dictatorship law, and the first signs of civil disobedience and protest. How half the African Americans in the state can be disenfranchised with not a peep from the political media is itself something that matters.

Hard to say yet. Cyprus is a unique case in many ways, so hard to say if significant groups of people in any number of other eurozone countries will interpret it in destabilizing ways on Monday or later. It may depend on how European politicians, EU Commissioners, and ECB board members continue to present the decisions. Or it may not. Hard to say with mass psychological matters like this. It's notable that barely anyone cared about the Cyprus bailout negotiations up until the decision, so I generally question whether dramatic/hyperventilating reactions now are sincere and will be acted on.

Best case, I think, is that some blowback/uproar on the terms gets deposits under $100k exempt. (Even though I think Cypriot citizens are in some sense themselves at fault for letting their banking system become an egregious Russian tax haven and money laundering outfit. That said, other Eurozone countries are also at fault for this, though perhaps not as egregiously as Cyprus. Luxembourg ain't got clean hands in finance matter surely.)

Hard to say yet. Cyprus is a unique case in many ways, so hard to say if significant groups of people in any number of other eurozone countries will interpret it in destabilizing ways on Monday or later.

You're watching the end stage of the stupid experiment known as the euro. It's proceeding in an agonizing and haphazard way. Every saver in Italy, Spain, Greece, etc. has to be thinking about where he can hide his savings.

Imagine the IMF and your government stealing 7% of your "safe" money while claiming that the banking crisis will now be fixed; this is huge, bigger than Argentina's 25% inflation rate.